USDA Crop Sequence Boundaries

The Crop Sequence Boundaries (CSB) developed with USDA's Economic Research Service, produces estimates of field boundaries, crop acreage, and crop rotations across the contiguous United States. It uses satellite imagery with other public data and is open source allowing users to conduct area and statistical analysis of planted U.S. commodities and provides insight on farmer cropping decisions. NASS needed a representative field to predict crop planting based on common crop rotations such as corn-soy and ERS is using this product to study changes in farm management practices like tillage or cover cropping over time. CSB represents non-confidential single crop field boundaries over a set time frame. It does not contain personal identifying information. The boundaries captured are of crops grown only, not ownership boundaries or tax parcels (unit of property). The data are from satellite imagery and publicly available data, it does not come from producers or agencies like the Farm Service Agency.
Product Details
Visibility
Public
Created
25 Nov 2024
Last Updated
3 Apr 2025
README

Field boundaries for USDA CSB

Crop Sequence Boundaries (CSB) is a vector-based geospatial dataset which are fully synthetic representations of agricultural fields, their acreage, and cropping rotation history. These new data are primarily derived from a historical stack of Cropland Data Layers over a set time frame based on an algorithm of geospatial functions. It was developed in cooperation with the Economic Research Service.

See metadata

Provides 16.194.865 field boundaries, based on data taken from taken from USDA CSB. Adjacent polygons with equal crops for 2023 have been merged ("dissolved") It has been converted to a fiboa GeoParquet file from data obtained from USDA.

Available free for download at https://www.nass.usda.gov/Research_and_Science/Crop-Sequence-Boundaries/. Github repository containing the code used to create the Crop Sequence Boundaries (CSB) can be found at https://github.com/USDA-REE-NASS/crop-sequence-boundaries/tree/main/csb-project.

  • Source Data Provider: USDA
  • Converted by: Ivor Bosloper
  • License: The USDA NASS Crop Sequence Boundaries and the data offered at https://www.nass.usda.gov/Research_and_Science/Crop-Sequence-Boundaries are provided to the public as is and are considered public domain and free to redistribute. Users of the Crop Sequence Boundaries (CSB) are solely responsible for interpretations made from these products. The CSB are provided 'as is' and the USDA NASS does not warrant results you may obtain using the data. Contact our staff at (SM.NASS.RDD.GIB@usda.gov) if technical questions arise.
  • Projection: EPSG:5070 ("Albers Conical Equal Area as used by mrlc.gov (NLCD)") info

Columns

PropertyData TypeDescription
idstring
crop:codestring
crop:namestring
administrative_area_level_2string
determination_datetimetimestamp
crop:code_liststring

Lineage

Source Cooperative is a Radiant Earth project